As digital media has become more popular, there has been much interest in using home networking technology to distribute the digital media among devices in the home. The digital media can be stored and played in many locations. Additionally, there may be many sources of the digital media such as multiple users in the home, content providers, and service providers. The demand for transferring digital media files may exceed the available bandwidth or latency constraints of the home network or portions of the home network. Excess demand may cause delivery delay. Since delivery of some of digital media files is time sensitive, delivery delay leads to rendering errors and artifacts that are annoying to users.
In the past, it has been proposed that reservation or allocation systems be used to avoid over-demand of the network links. This is based on the premise that the entire system of user applications and digital media files can be completely controlled. Unfortunately, reservation systems have fundamental flaws including requiring all users and applications to accurately know what amount of network resources they will need a priori, and requiring that all applications participate in the reservation system so that accurate allocation and calculations can be performed. These limitations are burdensome and have discouraged practical implementations.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.